If you sell something online, you have already noticed that the places people trust are not the places you can buy an ad in. A question typed into ChatGPT or Perplexity is answered from Reddit threads, forum comparisons and reviews. A question typed into Google increasingly gets an AI answer built from the same material. Your ad is not in it. Somebody's opinion is.
For the broader search-intent checklist, read how to rank in ChatGPT with brand mentions and real users.
So the practical question for a marketer in 2026 is how to get real people to talk about your product, and how to do that without buying fake reviews, which is now illegal in the two largest English-speaking markets. This guide answers both: the legal line and the kind of brief that produces a mention worth keeping.
Why mentions, not links, decide what AI says about you
Profound analysed 680 million citations from AI answers between August 2024 and June 2025 and published the shares by platform. Among Perplexity's ten most cited sources, Reddit alone accounts for 46.7%. In Google's AI Overviews it is 21%. ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia instead, at 47.9% of its top ten. The pattern is the same in every case: the model quotes places where people compare things, not places where brands describe themselves.
That is the whole reason brand mentions became a line in marketing budgets. A mention in a thread that the model already trusts does what a backlink did ten years ago. The difference is that a backlink could be bought quietly, and a mention that is bought quietly is now a regulatory problem.
What the law says now
Three sets of rules matter, and they agree with each other.
United States. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials was announced on 14 August 2024 and took effect 60 days after publication in the Federal Register, on 21 October 2024. It bans six things: fake or false reviews including AI-generated ones, paying for a review conditioned on its sentiment, insider reviews without disclosure, company-controlled review sites posing as independent, suppressing negative reviews by threat, and buying fake followers or views. The rule lets the FTC seek civil penalties against knowing violators. Note what it does not ban: paying somebody to write an honest review, as long as the payment does not depend on the review being positive and the relationship is disclosed.
United Kingdom. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act made fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews a banned practice from 6 April 2025. The CMA's guidance CMA208, dated 4 April 2025, defines a concealed incentivised review in two lines: a person has been commissioned to provide the review, and that fact is not made apparent. Commissioning includes money, commissions, discounts, vouchers and free loans. Missing, obscure or hidden disclosure counts as concealment. The same document treats offering services to procure such reviews as a banned practice in its own right, which is why we run our moderation the way we do.
Reddit. The platform-wide rules are shorter than the law and say the same thing. Rule 2: participate authentically in communities where you have a personal interest, do not spam or engage in content manipulation. Rule 5: be authentic, do not intentionally mislead others or impersonate an individual or entity. Subreddit moderators add their own limits on self-promotion, and they enforce them faster than any regulator.
Put together: you may pay a person to write. You may not pay for the opinion, and you may not hide the payment. Everything in the rest of this guide follows from that.
What gets rejected, and why it should
A brief that survives the rules above still fails if the writing reads like an ad, because the community will remove it before any regulator sees it. Our editorial moderation for tasks on AntiMedia's author marketplace rejects submissions for a short list of reasons, and the list is worth knowing whether or not you use the marketplace:
- No disclosure where the platform requires one. A post that hides the relationship is a concealed incentive, full stop.
- Copied or generated text. If the same paragraph exists anywhere else, or reads like a template, it goes back. Communities and AI systems both filter it out, so it earns nothing.
- No first-hand experience. "Great service, recommend" is a fake review by the CMA's definition, because it purports to be based on experience it does not have.
- A claim the author cannot back. Bonus amounts, win rates, "best in the market". These are the sentences that get a brand reported.
- The wrong place. Posting a product mention in a subreddit whose rules forbid it, or replying to a three-year-old thread nobody reads.
The useful mental test for any brief: would the author be comfortable if the moderator, the platform and the FTC all read it? If the answer needs a second thought, rewrite the brief.
A brief that works, and one that does not
Here is the kind of task that produces mentions worth having. Both are for the same imaginary betting exchange.
Bad brief. "Write 5 positive reviews about BetExample on Reddit and forums. Mention the 200% welcome bonus and fast withdrawals. Do not mention that this is sponsored."
Everything in it is a violation: the number of reviews, the fixed sentiment, the bonus claim, the concealment.
Good brief. "You have used BetExample for at least two weeks. In a thread where people ask how exchanges differ from bookmakers, explain in your own words what was better and what was worse than the two other services you used, including one thing you disliked. Disclose that BetExample paid for your time, in the form the subreddit's rules require. Do not quote bonus amounts. Link only if the thread's rules allow links."
The second brief costs more per placement, because it needs a real user with a real history. It also produces the only kind of text an AI answer will ever quote: specific, comparative, and signed by a person.
What honest mentions cost
There is no market price, so here is how to think about it instead.
A placement has three costs: the author's time, the moderation that checks the text before it goes live, and the risk the author carries on their own account. Cheap offers skip the second and hide the third. Compare that with what you are paying elsewhere. In our analysis of fake store pages we quoted Netcraft's figure of $50 to $350 in affiliate payouts per depositing player in gambling. One honest thread that sends two people who stay is worth more than a hundred that get removed, and it is still there next year.
Two rules for budgeting. Pay for the writing and the disclosure, never for the sentiment: the moment the payment depends on a positive tone you are inside the FTC's rule. And measure mentions the way you measure any channel: registrations and retention from the referrer, not the number of posts.
We are not selling fake scale
A brand mention campaign should not start with a dashboard screenshot. It should start with the question a real person can answer better than a landing page.
AntiMedia is not selling inflated reach, fake authority or recycled publisher numbers. It is an independent media project about the internet economy: the people, products, platforms, traffic, payments and stories behind how digital markets grow.
That is useful for advertisers because the work is checkable. A brief can name the audience, the platform, the claim, the proof required and the disclosure rule. An editor can reject copied text, unsupported claims, fake experience and posts placed in the wrong community.
If you need anonymous bulk PR, this is the wrong product. If you need a useful article, a clear explanation, a task brief for real authors or a piece of content an affiliate manager can send to a partner without embarrassment, that is the work AntiMedia is built for.
How to start, in order
- Write the disclosure line first, per platform, and put it in the brief.
- Pick the questions your support team hears most. Those are the threads that exist already.
- Find authors who have used the product, or give them time to. Two weeks is the minimum for a review that is not fake by definition.
- Brief for comparison, not praise. Ask for one thing they disliked.
- Have somebody who is not the author read every text against the list above before it goes live.
- Measure registrations and 30-day retention by referrer. Cut what does not hold.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to pay people to mention my brand? Yes, in the US and the UK, if the payment does not depend on the opinion expressed and the relationship is disclosed. Paying for a positive review, or hiding the payment, is banned in both.
Does a disclosed mention still help with AI visibility? The disclosure does not stop a model from reading the text. What matters is that the text is specific and sits in a place the model already cites, which for most questions means Reddit and specialist forums.
How many mentions do I need? Fewer than any seller will tell you. One thread that people keep finding is worth more than fifty that get removed. Start with the questions your customers actually ask.
Can I use AI to write the mentions? The FTC rule names AI-generated reviews explicitly as fake when they misrepresent a consumer's experience, and communities remove them on sight. Use it to draft the brief, not the post.
How long until it shows up in AI answers? Treat it as a long-term visibility layer, not a one-week campaign. Models tend to cite sources that are useful, specific and repeated across trusted places. Start with material a human would keep open after reading.
Method note
This article is based on current public rules from the FTC, CMA and Reddit, plus AntiMedia's own moderation rules for author tasks. It does not use marketplace performance numbers. The point is the operating model: pay for time, disclose the relationship, check the proof and reject fake experience.
